A Prophet on the Bleeding Edge: On Don DeLillo's "The Silence"

Don Delillo | The Silence | Simon & Schuster | October 20 2020 | 128 Pages

Don DeLillo’s new novel is full of questions, so it feels appropriate to start with a few of my own:

Was it necessary to set the book in that one font that looks like a typewriter did it?

Was the pixelation of the author photo intentional?

Does anyone really say “datasphere”?

Was it basically inevitable that in a book about everyone’s digital devices getting simultaneously bricked a character would utter the line, “You like your screen”?

Why does it feel like a sin of omission that at no point in the novel does anyone refer to the Super Bowl as “The Big Game”?

Is this a failure of realism?

Did DeLillo find the book’s epigraph (Einstein’s “I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought…”) on Wikiquote?

Should I care?

Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?

That last one is actually a line from The Silence. Tonally, it captures the prevailing mood of DeLillo’s seventeenth novel (eighteenth if you’re counting Amazons), which feels familiar if you’ve been following his recent work. DeLillo’s later works are generally gnomic, meditative, and ascetic in style and tone, trading in the etiological approach of his early and mid-career novels for a more prophetic stance. Climate change, biological warfare, and mass extinction events loom eschatologically on their margins. Writing on Zero K, DeLillo’s flensed treatment of the absurd plutocratic quest for eternal life, Christian Lorentzen described the novel, up til now DeLillo’s latest, as “an almost anti-social book, written not into history but toward the future.”

That “future-turn” is one of the better ways of characterizing late DeLillo. Gone is the paranoid maximalism of Libra and Underworld, books that charted a vision of history as a hyperconnective series of sub rosa machinations. Plotting and narrative—and especially the dehumanizing over-plotting famously derided by James Wood—disappear. In Zero K, we find the image-making sovereignty of the terrorist evinced in Mao II replaced by the technocrat’s vision. Wealth, and the totalizing enactment of a vision afforded by it, have made both novelists and violent provocateurs reality-making beggars. Fiction-making itself seems terminally downgraded. “Here, there were no lives to think about or imagine,” Zero K’s narrator observes of a cryogenic facility stocked with frozen bodies. “This was pure spectacle, a single entity, the bodies regal in their cryonic bearing...a form of visionary art.”

So what are we supposed to make of The Silence, a work so ethereal and cobbled-together it seems a generous gesture to call it a novel at all? Taken together, DeLillo’s late novels model an implicit critique of emergent technologies while, on a formal level, straining consciously away from the hyperconnectivity of his earlier works. Superficially, of course, The Silence is a novel about disconnection. At the novel’s start, everybody’s digital devices suddenly stop working. But considered another way, the novel’s abstruse dialogue and off-kilter sense of action—conversation is peppered with scientific and pseudoscientific jargon, and the characters often seem to be working through the routine of an experimental mimeshow—gesture at another purpose. DeLillo is interested in the shadow of digital consciousness, the imprint of a network left behind when the training wheels of our phones and screens have disappeared.

The Silence opens on a flight back to New York from France, which later crash-lands during the novel’s singularity event. (This is airplane crash as plot device, however, not as spectacle, as in Falling Man, or confrontation-with-the-desert-of-the-real, as in White Noise.) Jim Kripps is sitting next to his wife, Tessa Berens, and having a bad time. As evidence of this, we get a rote list of what a flight is: “Eye mask, face moisturizer, the cart with wines and liquors that an attendant pushes along the aisle now and then.” If you’re inclined to think flying on a plane is unpleasant but maybe not the acme of alienating experiences, the novel’s opening pages are probably going to feel a little heavy handed. There’s a solemnity to the book that DeLillo seems to have tossed over it all like a fat comforter—it falls indiscriminately, draping everything from the seemingly supernatural to the banal in a flocculent sense of dread.

All information, in The Silence, is equal. The formal device that Delillo chooses to democratize his information is the list. Here’s the opening of Chapter 2, for instance:

They sat waiting in front of the superscreen TV. Diane Lucas and Max Stenner. The man had a history of big bets on sporting events and this was the final game of the football season, American football, two teams, eleven players each team, rectangular field one hundred yards long, goal lines and goal posts at either end, the national anthem sung by a semi-celebrity, six U.S. Air Force Thunderbirds streaking over the stadium.

Although the ungenerous reading of this passage would be that it reads like an unfiltered first draft, the generous reading offers up a few insights. In its curt enumeration, it has something to say about the quantumized way we receive information today, and the resulting impossibility of symphonic description—say, the opening mass-wedding scene of Mao II, or the procession at the start of White Noise, or Pafko at the Wall—that used to be one of DeLillo’s great strengths.

Part of the book’s central conceit is that, stuck to our screens, we’re losing the ability to organically filter information, to choose what’s important and what’s not based on our own predilections. Screens and their algorithms do that for us, so much so that without them, reality rushes in, a string of flattened data points. Hence the book’s almost parodically telegraphic prose. Here, for example, is the character introduction for Jim’s wife: “She was Jim’s wife, dark-skinned, Tessa Berens, Carribean-European-Asian origins, a poet whose work appeared often in literary journals.” Lists in The Silence don’t comment or suggest, but simply tabulate. For better or worse, you’re left with logorrhea, a conspiratorial concordance—left unnarrativized, the items in the list bear a menacing nimbus of secrecy, as though they might yet be connected in ways too fine to grasp.

As several reviewers have pointed out, The Silence is, at its heart, and despite all its space-filling Beckettian mummery, concerned with language and its etiolation by digital technologies. Some of the novel’s earliest thoughts on the constrictions placed on communication by contemporary life are also some of its most lucid. On the plane with Jim and Tessa, we read the following:

Here, in the air, much of what the couple said to each other seemed to be a function of some automated process, remarks generated by the nature of airline travel itself. None of the ramblings of people in rooms, in restaurants, where major motion is stilled by gravity, talk free-floating. All these hours over oceans or vast landmasses, sentences trimmed, sort of self-encased, passengers, pilots, cabin attendants, every word forgotten that moment the plane sets down on the tarmac and begins to taxi endlessly toward an unoccupied jetway.

DeLillo, here uncharacteristically sentimental, is concerned with the question of where exactly language is free—that is, where is it airy, improvisational, released from the oppressive thumb of a system? There’s an expressive liberty to be found in the happenstance that defines deviceless communication—a word disappears, we lose it, and are forced to trudge on, bending our language around these human lacunae. Early in The Silence, Tessa racks her brain for a factoid to answer a question from Jim. When it arrives unassisted, with no help from her phone, she’s satisfied. “Came out of nowhere,” she thinks. Then: “There is almost nothing left of nowhere.”

But communication—like democracy, according to the pundits—requires a shared language. Some of DeLillo’s greatest novels are, in essence, investigations of how shared languages arise—think of the consumerist argot of White Noise, the mid-century American mythos (baseball, Sinatra and Martin) of Underworld, or the false flag sub-diction of Libra. Lately, DeLillo’s fictions have been seduced by the etherealizing tendencies of technology’s rapidly ramifying vocabularies. We sense this in Zero K, where the visionary ethos of the ultra-rich finds in the gleaming abstraction of cryogenic verbiage a latent justification for its own sense that it is more-than-human, and in The Silence, where a meteor storm of cutting-edge technological jargon floods the text, the lexical detritus of the digital age.

As the text notes at one point, “the war rolls on and the terms accumulate.” But you get the sense, reading The Silence, that the terms have become too rarefied for DeLillo to handle, that things have finally gotten away from him. More than half a century ago, Hannah Arendt had already articulated this problem in the prologue to The Human Condition. As science progressed in the twentieth century, she wrote, it had begun to “move in a world where speech ha[d] lost its power.” Science had become so advanced that its “truths” were no longer widely intelligible, and were expressed instead in a language of formulas and symbols that, although “originally meant only as an abbreviation for spoken statements, now contain[ed] statements that in no way [could] be translated back into speech.” The logical endpoint of this trend, Arendt suggested, was a state of affairs in which “we would indeed need artificial machines to do our thinking and speaking” for us.

DeLillo, in his own way, is haunted by these same concerns. But despite its subtle self-awareness (there’s some spry Nabokovian deception when it comes to the attribution of the text’s quotations and epigraph, and it would be hard to argue that DeLillo isn’t wryly cognizant of how stupid some of the language he deploys sounds), The Silence ultimately suggests that he’s fallen prey to his own flirtation with technobabble. His penchant for tripartite lists is on full display, though suddenly they feel like padding, and aren’t wedded to form in any meaningful way. “Wave structure, metric tensor, covariant qualities,” relies, for instance, on a simple joke—techspeak as religious mantra—whereas “Mastercard, Visa, American Express,” from White Noise, both profanes the holy trinity and mimics, in its three-part structure, the swipe, swipe, swiping of endless consumerism.

But there’s another view of language that seems relevant, namely, that language is communal, contextual, and particular—that, as Michael Holquist observed of Bakhtin’s philosophy of language, there is “no such things as a ‘general language,’ a language that is spoken by a general voice, that may be divorced from a specific saying.” The truly living language is the spoken language, the heteroglossic language, which arises when we’re separated from our devices—when, for instance, Tessa is allowed to languidly recall a fact, to have it drift up to the surface of her psyche, bearing traces of her own mind’s associations. DeLillo’s recent reliance on a prophetic tone speaks to this split between general languages and the sudden salience of the utterance, since the word of a prophet is just that paradoxical thing: the spoken word crystallized, cold, and pure, lifted from the warming embrace of its contextuality.

So what happens to a prophet on the bleeding edge? If The Silence offers any answer, it’s that he’s left asking questions. But prophets—sort of famously—aren’t known for their questions. The Silence is an interrogative novel, but too often it frets over the sort of airy, unactionable queries that typify a certain brand of geriatric humanism. Even if the moment is bookended by reflections on surveillance technologies and facial recognition software, when the novel asks a question like “How do we know who we are?” it leaves a decidedly sentimental taste in the mouth.

Now, zoom out. Consider the crowd, its serried ranks. Crowds, so much of DeLillo’s fiction argues, are power. But something curious seems to have happened to the crowds in The Silence. Throughout the novel, characters comment on the growing crowds in the street, where deviceless citydwellers have gathered to make sense of their new monoreality. There are intimations of violence, hints of rage and disorder. We read the word “riot.” But by and large, the crowds in The Silence are ghostly, attenuated, unable to fully coalesce—something holds them back. Even their description feels muted and second-order when compared with the famous opening scene of Mao II, with its mythic color and strains of triumphalist agitprop. There’s no cult leader to wind everyone up and together. DeLillo’s point seems to be that our phones are the cult leaders now.

It’s worth pointing out that DeLillo’s late works are comparatively apolitical, as though the immediacy of the political imagination, which seeks solutions in the here and now, were at odds with the vatic declamation that now seems his main fictional mode. In our current moment, defined as it is in part by the potentialities of networked protest, it feels like a bit of an oversight to write a work that so stringently asserts the dehumanizing effects of digital technologies. Sure, it’s nice that DeLillo seems to give a shit about your human soul. But smartphones didn’t give us the entrenched racial hierarchies, the stagnant wages, the environmental collapse and housing crises and corporate monoculture that typify late capitalism. America did that. DeLillo’s modish prophesying borrows, to a fault, apocalyptic thinking’s compressed experience of time. Obsessed with diagnosing an impending catastrophe, it finds faults immediately, and settles, a bit too comfortably, into the frantic blame-casting of a prophet out of his depth and time.